


Amputare

by Slyboots



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Atrocities, Empurata, M/M, Pre-Cybertronian Civil War, Unethical Medicine
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-12 10:01:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29882895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slyboots/pseuds/Slyboots
Summary: "In the quartexes after empurata, survivors often starved. With lead in his belly and ice in his Spark chamber he remembered the statistics: 80% after surgery; 50% after six quartexes; 10% survival after a metacycle."In the last uncertain days before the revolution, Ratchet sees dozens of empuratees in his charity clinic. A growing number of them show a second set of surgical scars: someone is patching up the poorest of the poor (badly). So Ratchet delves into the Iaconian underworld, tracking down the back-alley medics who--apparently despite themselves--are saving lives...Knock Out lost more than his faceplate and his hands to Zeta Prime: he lost his pride. Breakdown cares for the weak and the wounded, despite his better instincts.
Relationships: Knock Out/Breakdown
Comments: 22
Kudos: 34





	1. Vain Little Thing

It was a bright and stormy night. Electricity arced, with a crackle that seared Ratchet’s wiring, between closely-spaced warehouse walls.

Lower Iacon, beneath the gilded spires, was a warren. Even after vorns scuttling in the dark, his memory of the back alleys failed him. Ratchet brought up the coordinates, his wrist’s projector almost guttering out in the feverish light.

Soundwave’s tip-offs never failed. Often it seemed Soundwave was nothing _but_ tip-offs: ten thousand scurrilous whispers and a hundred thousand secrets poured into a cold shell.

But he’d ( _it’d_ ) been right. This was the clinic.

  
A steady hand had seared _AUTARCHS SLAG OFF_ into the back door. Ratchet knocked twice, as he’d been told, feeling increasingly foolish.

“I’m here for your house call,” he tried after a cycle.

The door opened into darkness, punctuated by the glare of headlights. “You the health inspector?” A deep, booming chuckle.

Ratchet held his ground. The charge-storm flashed, ball lightning floating weightless through the shabby abandoned lot. Around them the air smelled of burnt chlorine. “A little deployer told me you need a doctor. I’m here to help.”

The monstrous warframe sized him up. “Soundwave sic you on us?”

There was grudging fear in it.

“Let’s pass on that question,” said Ratchet, sounding insincere in his own audials. “As one grumpy old medic to another—”

The warframe’s burnished faceplate twisted; he let out a startled laugh. “ _Funny_ little doctor.” His optics blazed golden, reflecting the night. “Run back to Soundwave. I see your shiny face around here again, you’ll need your empurator pals to give you a new head.”

* * *

Countless Iaconian summers before Ratchet met the street-mechanics, Breakdown met a mech with a dizzying smile.

It seemed a charmed summer. They snuck into tatty second-run theaters, smuggling in Engex-flasks. Knock Out picked fights; Breakdown finished them. At each other’s weak jokes they laughed uproariously.

“My partner in crime,” said Knock Out as they watched the bright storms creep across the horizon. “Or at least a few misdemeanors.”

Breakdown slipped an arm around him. The charge in the air leapt between their bodies, fizzing and spitting; with Knock Out at his side, the world seemed brighter. A sharp focus he’d never known.

Knock Out was vapid; Knock Out was cruel. Knock Out was too self-absorbed to know he was lonely. Breakdown forgave him that. They were Conjugated in high summer, shabby and sweltering. They’d known each other six quartexes. A wildfire romance.

Life came easily to garnet-eyed Knock Out, as quick and beautiful and sharp as the lightning. At times he seemed too perfect to be real, as if he’d evaporate at any second, a trick of the light—

“If _those_ dimsparks can get through medical school,” groused Knock Out as they limped from a back-alley clinic, their fresh welds aching in the humidity, “how hard can it be?”

And that, Breakdown would reflect later, was the snapping point. As if some catch in the world had finally come loose.

* * *

“Can’t say I didn’t try,” said Ratchet. He spoke too loudly around Soundwave, to fill the humming air.

The darkness bent strangely around Soundwave, light condensing on his dull armor like dew. He gestured slowly. Meaninglessly, perhaps.

They sat in a dead canteen, two joors before opening. Soundwave squatted like a pigeonoid on the back of the dusty booth. Unrecognizable symbols flickered, too fast for Ratchet’s optics to capture, across his faceplate.

He’d been a Councilor once, rumor had it; but Ratchet wrote off gossip, as a rule.

“They don’t trust me. Why should they?” Ratchet’s _bearings_ ached. He’d worked 32 joors without recharge; now he felt simultaneously insubstantial, as if hollowed out by exhaustion, and leaden. “Every physician in town’s a tool of the Primacy.”

Soundwave pointed to Ratchet’s chest. In Megatronus’s harsh voice he rattled, “Physicians are the keepers of the weak and the wounded—”

He’d been flattered, for a nanocycle, when he’d heard it from Megatronus’s vocoder; now it felt hollow and cheap.

“None of that nonsense,” said Ratchet, unmollified. “Physicians are a pack of comfortable old mechs who can’t see past their own faceplates. Myself included.”

The sun was rising. Through the canteen’s scummy windows, indistinct figures thronged the streets; Iacon never slept.

In the first rays of daylight, Soundwave looked all the more uncanny. He sat perfectly still; in his hunched posture, in the oily smell of his mini-servos, Ratchet recognized the telltale signs of surgery.

“Sooner or later we’re all going to get our faces scraped,” said Ratchet into the silence. “Good riddance to us.”

The lime-green LED glow of the Docks guttered, night falling fast.

Ratchet locked the clinic door. The Docks were a low-rent district, adjoining the industrial warrens; skivs and siphoners and empuratees drifted regularly through the steam tunnels. (The least—or most—fortunate died there.) It paid to be careful.

As he turned to leave, a weak clatter drifted from the dark. A faceless femme stumbled up the curb.

“By the Allspark,” murmured Ratchet, “you made me jump.”

She groped with her peg-hands, feeling for the clinic sign set into iron walls. Her single optic glowed in a scraped-clean faceplate; greenish corrosion encrusted exposed wiring. She smelled of rust.

She seemed liable to blow at any nanocycle.

With a sigh that did little to still his rattling fans, Ratchet unlocked the door again.

The effluvium of Lower Iacon washed up at his clinic door, sans optics and hands and T-cogs. The botched patients. Ratchet cared for them, one and all. Ratchet cared too often and too much, he sometimes thought.

In the warm silence he poured her a glass of cloudy Energon, guiding it to the narrow valve serving as an intake. She gulped it down, her exposed fuel lines spasming.

In the quartexes after _empurata_ , survivors often starved. With lead in his belly and ice in his Spark chamber he remembered the statistics: 80% after surgery; 50% after six quartexes; 10% survival after a metacycle.

“I don’t suppose,” he said, as casually as he could, “you have a caretaker. That would be too easy.”

She shook her head vehemently, blinking: twice for no.

One could learn to drink quite well with two pegs for hands, if one were of sound mind and body. A tall order for most empuratees.

Her vocoder had rusted in her chest. Infection. A well-known side effect of sloppy face-scraping, so common it had a sardonic name ( _icepick’s mutism_ ). Someone had extracted it roughly—her breastplate had crumpled under the force, the fault-lines white and painful-looking—and welded the wound. 

Ironic, thought Ratchet as he peeled the corrosion from her mangled faceplate. It’d taken millennia of training to mutilate her; then some oaf of a street-mechanic had saved her life.

“If you were _my_ patient, madam—”

—though of course she was—

“—I’d have some _very_ stern words with your surgeon.” It sounded pathetic, like shouting into a void. His voice echoed in the dead air. His pick squeaked, catching on an exposed groove in the alloy.

She sucked air, a long and hopeless sound. The empty space in her breastplate whistled.

* * *

“The mandibular plate’s connected to the—” Breakdown squinted at the datapad. “Uh.”

Knock Out lounged in hip-deep oil, sipping cheap moonshine. They’d salvaged the shallow washtub from the scrapyard. Through the warehouse’s crumbling roof, shafts of moonlight puddled in the oil.

One day, Knock Out had promised him, they’d have hot running oil; they’d drink Betelgeusian brandy; they’d live in Translucentica Heights, and Breakdown would rub broad shoulders with the High Council and their hangers-on—

And Breakdown supposed that didn’t sound so bad.

They were reviewing for Knock Out’s anatomy exams, more or less. The night was sweltering. Breakdown wiped oily condensation from the datapad, tilting the hologram left and right. “Mandibular plate’s hooked up to the servo trigeminalis. Whatever that is.”

“Pops off like—” Knock Out reached back, finding his jaw with a damp fingertip. He swiped along Breakdown’s chin. “— _that_. Nice little click.”

Breakdown rolled his optics, wiping the warm oil away with the back of one hand. “You already know all this stuff?”

“It’s P-nuts. Monkey-wrench work, between you and me.” Knock Out set his drink down beside the tub. “Any old mechanic can take a face off. You could do it.”

Breakdown stared at his own blunt fingers, silently. The oil gleamed in the moonlight, on a blacksmith’s scarred hands.

“The lingo’s just to sucker the customer. Makes it sound _real_ technical. And technical means— _zzzt_ !” Knock Out yawned delicately, miming a credit transfer. “Now, _building_ a face—that’s the tricky business.”

Again Breakdown felt lost. The black oil gleamed, and though only two meters deep, it sucked at the gaze. “That why the empurators make the big Shanix?”

Knock Out’s laugh was startled. Breakdown loved that: the spontaneity of it, the quick cruelty. “The empurators build faces on an assembly-line. _No_ art to it. You could do that, easy.” He paused. In the hazy moonlight he was beautiful enough to quench Sparks. “But they _are_ rolling in it.”

They were poor, and they were grimy. Knock Out had talked of nothing but the glamorous life for quartexes.

“How’s it feel to be a trophy conjunx, Breakdown?” Knock Out’s optics half-shuttered. His smile was transported, almost dreamy. “When I’m done with residency, you’ll never work another solar cycle. Never take some foreman’s scrap again. You’ll be a kept bot—”

Knock Out passed his exams with flying colors, as Breakdown had known he would. There seemed nothing Knock Out could not do—

—save self-examination.

Weight-loss surgery paid just as well as empurata. “Lifestyle specialty,” Knock Out said carelessly, his head a grounding weight in Breakdown's lap. “Can’t beat the hours or the clientele. _And_ the Autarchs—” A political jab (though Knock Out loathed politics, as a rule). “—leave us alone.”

“Wouldn’t know,” said Breakdown, massaging warm wax into Knock Out’s faceplate. Delicate work: he distrusted buffers, but he trusted his hands. “Not my crowd.”

“Now you’re talking. You’re out of their league.” The wax squeaked. “Never seen those waxjobs gut a skydart. _Or_ find the stuck wires in my back.”

A skyship passed over their habsuite with a rumble like distant thunder; through the cracked roof its lights illuminated Knock Out’s faceplate. Knock Out looked for a cycle unearthly. Too beautiful to be real—

—and the light passed, and Breakdown was dabbing away smudges on his faceplate. In his encrypted processor banks, Breakdown liked the smudges: they made Knock Out seem a living thing. Imperfect.

“Breakdown,” said Knock Out, almost pleadingly, “we _deserve_ this.”

He believed it implicitly; Knock Out, who insisted so often that he believed in nothing, clung to it like holy writ. _We deserve this._

Breakdown reached for the chamois. “Well, deserve it or not, I guess we’re gonna get it. Rich and famous. Gonna take a lot of wax to make _me_ into arm candy.”

Some half-compiled scrap of code drifted at the edges of his processor, the ghost of a thought. In the pulse of his Spark, Breakdown felt a flicker of dread.

“You _were_ thinking about empurata, huh?”

“No guarantees on the placement interviews,” said Knock Out, examining his claws. “Might’ve been my second choice.”

* * *

“It’s barbaric.” Ratchet thumped his fist on the table. “An outrage.”

Orion Pax sipped his Energon, looking grave. The sun was setting over Upper Iacon, the spires gleaming a brilliant gold; through the veil of smog no money could clear, the world seemed far away. Unreal. “Is the death rate really—”

“Well, I don’t know what the death rate is.” Ratchet cut him off, the air around them popping with his indignation. “Undoubtedly a _great_ deal higher than anyone reports.”

Orion’s brow-ridges drew together.

He was kind, reflected Ratchet, and—shut away in his archives—he was at times disarmingly naive. Perhaps the two went hand-in-hand. Orion believed in justice.

“I have seen the reports,” said Orion in a low voice, a small voice. “The crackdowns on the support groups.”

Ratchet raised a finger, willing himself not to snap. “Your average empuratee is hardly going to _support groups_ . They’re lucky if they can _fuel_ themselves.”

At times Orion seemed to be goading him, with that troubled innocent look. At times Ratchet suspected Orion knew far more than he let on.

Orion was _decent_. Some things could not coexist with decency.

The moons were rising in the rose-gold sky. They sat in Orion’s habsuite, watching dusk creep over Iacon: the city’s lower levels, the Docks and the steel-district and the vast insatiable smelters, were invisible from such heights. Easy to forget.

“Is anyone keeping track of empuratees?” Orion set down his cube. The steam painted the window, trickling down in rivulets. “Beyond Soundwave, I mean.”

Ratchet snorted. Sometimes Orion said the obvious. “Soundwave has probes up all of our exhaust ports, you mark my words.” But it was a good question. “Some of them were poor fools in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hardly anyone cares if they’re online or not.”

His own Energon was cooling, untouched. Orion pushed it across the table, his irises contracting. 

Sometimes Orion believed most in things written down. An archivist’s mindset.

Ratchet sighed, shaking his head. “The records are terrible. Intentionally, I fear. All I know—all _anyone_ knows—is that the Science Academy graduates more empurators every year, and the Council keeps funding new residencies for this—disgrace.” His lip curled. “They’re getting worse at it, or they’re running out of good surgeons. I see hackjob after hackjob in my clinic.”

“Your clinic.” Orion seemed to grab the thought like a chain thrown to a drowning mech. “Can you afford to keep it open?”

Ratchet funded his charity work out of his own accounts.

“Barely.”

Orion’s lips thinned. “Soundwave will find the money,” he said, with such conviction Ratchet’s Spark dimmed for an instant. “Megatronus has barely said a word about this—”

“Not just Megatronus.” The sun had half-vanished behind a steel horizon. Ratchet felt a swell of indignation, a wave of despair. “ _No one_ ’s said a word. No one who matters. Until they start scraping Councilors or actors—or doctors—”

He leaned forward.

“Between you and me, Orion, a surgeon disappeared last metacycle. Vain little thing, or so the rumor goes. Too stupid to be dangerous.”


	2. Scraplets and Scrape-lets

On antiquated datatrax, Ratchet kept notes. “Old and rusty,” he told his patients, with a brittle laugh, “like me.”

Anything posted to the Grid could be scraped. One never knew precisely what would trigger a monitor script—a  _ Scrape-let _ , they were nicknamed by the seditious—

( _ Scraping _ . A funny choice of metaphor.)

—and once flagged by a monitor script, one’s case could be escalated at any moment. And Ratchet knew too well where that led.

So on Soundwave’s advice, Ratchet logged his cases offline. Six empuratees trickled through his charity clinic in thirteen solar cycles; two died there. In a fit of dogged hope, he kept their bodies in the storage room, waiting for conjuges and amici who never came.

Between patients, he examined the bodies, murmuring useless apologies as he flipped them over. One had an infected intake valve, the rubber-rot so advanced that her fuel lines crumbled between his fingers. Her headbox’s internals were wet with backed-up, frothy purge. The other had died with a flash and a snap, from some sudden neural net malfunction: his motherboard reeked of burnt silicon. Ratchet’s vents snapped shut automatically—but already he’d tasted the corrosion.

From their frametypes and their credential chips, both were artisan-class. An artisan with no hands might well starve, he reflected. Perhaps they’d known each other.

The taste of tarnished copper lingered on his chemoreceptors for solar cycles. No drink could wash it away. (He drank anyway.)

At last he handed them over to the sanitation crews, for anonymous interments in numbered warehouses. The chop-shops were an unthinkable option—barbarity aside, no chop-shop would take such mangled bodies.

Ratchet wished, at times, that he believed the old legends about Primus, Unicron, and the Thirteen. How nice it would be to have someone to blame for the state of the world.

“No friends. No partners. No dignified burial. They might as well never have existed.” At times like these he struggled to keep his voice low. “I ask you.  _ What _ kind of government—”

Orion looked stricken. Spark-sick. “I cannot say.”

“Of course you can’t.” Ratchet felt his shoulders slump, the mini-servos giving way. “I’ll eat my actuator if the Council doesn’t know about the death rate. But the research literature—it’s a wasteland—”

Though of course, Orion knew that.

It was safer to talk at home (though not  _ safe _ ). From Orion’s habsuite window, they watched the lightning storms gather over Upper Iacon. A squadron of Seekers dipped and wheeled, heedless of the glow building in the deep-blue sky.

“You did report—”

Ratchet cut him off, clicking his vocoder. “Naturally I reported their deaths. What kind of monster do you take me for? Now, whether anyone is  _ listening _ , that’s another story.”

The Seekers’ lights tinted the clouds. They whipped round, borne up by the wind. Ratchet drank deeply; the Visco did little to warm him, though the night was balmy.

“Your clinic is legal. They may be going to others.” Orion swirled his drink, staring into the cube. “Where a body would not be reported.”

Again Ratchet felt the sting of annoyance: at Orion for his naivete; at himself for his helplessness. “No  _ may _ about it. Half of my patients have scars from back-alley work. It’s a crime against medicine—and I don’t doubt that Zeta Prime likes it that way.” 

Real physicians were in scant supply in the industrial districts; the few holdouts were spies or company drones.

So the poorest of the poor turned to butchers.

The scars were getting cleaner; the street-mechanics were improving, thought Ratchet with a grim inward laugh. Practice made perfect.

He ran a squealing probe over a cheap-looking weld, steadying the archivist-class with a free hand. “If you don’t mind a few questions from a nosy old doc-bot—”

The archivist’s headbox had been sliced neatly in two and roughly welded together: an Iaconian facelift, said the cynical. His single optic rolled back with a whir. “I do mind. But do your worst.”

“—who helped you?”

* * *

At any nanocycle, it seemed, the blast front would hit. Breakdown waited, with formless dread scurrying round his processor.

But why brood? Life was a party. The solar cycles smeared together into a blur of gleaming paint and strong liquor. They changed addresses twice: their new habsuite had an oil-bath deep enough for Breakdown and a view of the Observatory. They drank (heavily). Knock Out danced the Praxian binary-tango with the rich and the glittering; Breakdown was content to watch.

Only as the invitations started to dry up did Breakdown realize that Knock Out was not well-liked.

It was Breakdown’s own fault, he surmised at first. He was too big—too rough—too uncouth. An ill-Sparked warframe, without even the polish of the Air Command.

At Primesday galas he leaned against the wall, draining dainty cocktails that scarcely whetted his thirst. Few approached him; beneath languid stares he squirmed.

Knock Out’s bark of a laugh cut through the crowds’ babble. “ _ Bodyguard _ , my spoiler—”

And one by one, the surgeons and the diplomats drifted away from him, until Knock Out stood alone in a growing bubble of silence.

“Not my kinda party,” growled Breakdown again. They’d been arguing for three joors. “You don’t need me there.”

Mercury-rain streaked their windows, hammering lightly on the glass. Iacon’s skyline was a shadowy blur.

Paint-blistering heat rolled off Knock Out’s frame. “Watch it, Breakdown. Starting to sound a touch ungrateful.”

On stolen solar cycles he was the old Knock Out again.

They took quartexes off, draining their savings. In the contaminated steppes of the Acid Wastes, they watched the moons rise in a discolored sky. Breakdown cracked open a barrel of Stanixian sour-wine; drunk, they talked of everything and nothing. Breakdown did loopy donuts around Knock Out, both of them laughing.

On such nights, Breakdown thought perhaps they could live this way forever.

But there was more money to be made. “You’re an expensive date,” remarked Knock Out as Breakdown drained the barrel, his intake valves hiccuping.

And money had curdled Knock Out’s innermost Energon.

  
  


_ Prime’s getting chunky. I know a few procedures that could help with that. _ The ping hit him from across the cocktail party; for an instant Breakdown’s processor whirled. Something was wrong.

_ Knock Out. You’re tanked. _

And then, with dawning horror as heads turned, the crowd rippling like a puddle of oil,  _ Knock Out. You’re on the public comms channel. _

“He  _ is _ ,” mumbled Knock Out into Breakdown’s shoulder. Their habsuite’s lights rose, dim and soothing, as they stumbled inside. “Could stand to hear it.”

Breakdown almost dropped him. “I oughtta total you right now.”

Sweet music rolled through their hab. In the streets far below, someone was shouting; hunter-seeker skyships circled far above, their beams streaking the black clouds. Another protest, then.

Breakdown gestured violently; the music died. At once he regretted it. Cold silence demanded filling.

“We’re both gonna be scrap metal.” Breakdown’s Spark burned hot enough to scorch its chamber. “You know what they’re calling you, huh? Caste-crosser—”

“—diesel-drinker,” muttered Knock Out. He belched. Hiccuped, nuzzling Breakdown’s pauldron. “Pack of muddy skidplates. Don’t appreciate you.”

Breakdown gritted his teeth, a yell prickling in his vocoder. Condensed exhaust beaded on his brow, trickling into his optics; he blinked it away. None too gently, he lowered Knock Out into the berth.

“We’re scum. Bottom-feeders. Scraplets. You wanna play with the pretty waxjobs, Knock Out, you gotta keep your mouth shut.”

Words he’d come to regret.

At last Knock Out slipped into recharge, his fans whirring. Breakdown stroked Knock Out’s pretty shoulder, releasing coolant lines; a damp chill spread through Knock Out’s armor, and his fans’ insistent buzz eased.

The shouting was growing louder, a staticky agitated note in it. Breakdown hesitated for an instant.

Knock Out’s face twitched, white lips pressing together. He rolled over.

That decided it. Breakdown stormed over to the window, clenching his fist; the glass retracted with a whoosh, and the heavy air washed over him. Breakdown leaned over the balcony, his voice hoarse. “You have ten nanocycles to shut up, or I’m gonna—”

His missile launcher engaged, whirling round. That caught him short. He’d been poised to fire.

As he strode from the habsuite, he paused at Knock Out’s bedside. Tender and frightened, he ran a fingertip over Knock Out’s pale cheek.

“We’ll talk tomorrow.”

In an abandoned lot in Lower Iacon, he ripped totaled skydarts apart with his bare hands. Oil flooded over his fingertips, its tang filling his chemoreceptors. Breakdown felt an ugly grin twist his faceplate. He  _ felt _ ugly; he felt volatile, as if his Energon were under wrenching pressure. As if at any second his magazine might detonate.

He purged his rage like old brake fluid, until the night stank of anger. 

Beneath a bitter dawn, he walked the long kilometers back to the habsuite. The door was ajar, warm air and soft music flowing into the hall.

Breakdown’s missile launcher twitched in its housing. As if in a trance he yanked the door aside.

For a nanocycle he could not place the reeling shock: there was no spray of Knock Out’s Energon across the walls; no overturned furniture and no sign of a struggle; no warning scrawled in luminescent paint. Yet Knock Out’s Engex cube, half-drunk, lay smashed on the floor. 

* * *

“Yes, yes, of course I  _ can _ do it—”

The Docks’s patina-green glow filtered through the doorway behind Soundwave. The night smelled of smoke, of cordite.

“—but with a few more resources—and frankly, a physician who’s recharged recently—”

Soundwave shook his head, his joints oddly silent. Ratchet’s shoulders sagged.

“You trust me not to make trouble. Well, that’s  _ your _ problem. Come in.”

Soundwave refused all anesthetic. The wound in his arm, ragged-edged and raw, still smoked; around it the metal had buckled. He proffered no explanation; Ratchet kept up a steady stream of gripes until, at last, he too fell silent.

He pried aside slender fuel lines, digging for shards of frayed metal. Though the wound must have burned, Soundwave did not flinch—so Ratchet did not flinch either.

The thought arrived on Ratchet’s HUD, a silent ping: a wordless offer of a thousand Shanix.

“If you have that kind of money,” said Ratchet with a snort, “you can put it to better use than paying me off.””

Still he accepted.

“You’ll have to pardon my curiosity—”

Soundwave shook his head. In the dry enveloping darkness, his frame hummed; it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

Ratchet shivered, but he pushed on, with a cheer he didn’t feel. “But these are no everyday frame modifications. What kind of reckless street-mechanic agreed to—”

Again Soundwave shook his head, more slowly. His vocoder spat static; lights danced across his faceplate.

“You don’t trust me  _ that _ much,” said Ratchet with a dry laugh.

Not all street-mechanics were amateurs. Back-alley doctors—the greedy and the disgraced—thronged Kaon and Slaughter City, where restrictions were few and spare parts plentiful.

But Iacon was an Arachnicon’s-web of informants, and only the truly desperate would risk their licenses and their Sparks. A legitimate surgeon in Iacon could be assured a comfortable clientele and a steady income; a tender-Sparked dissenter might be stripped for spare parts. What sane medic would risk it?

(At times Ratchet felt he’d lost his own mind.)

And so Iacon’s poor turned to drill-wielding incompetents. A short step above murderers. And so, conveniently, they were mangled a second time.

How smoothly the machine ran, keeping every cog in its place. At times, Ratchet burned with a loathing so cold he felt his Spark might snuff to embers.

And yet his patients’ scars were getting cleaner, and some of them survived.

“That clinic in the steel district,” said Ratchet, with dawning comprehension. “Where I got that friendly welcome. You didn’t send me there to knock on their door and spread the good word of Megatronus.”

Soundwave flashed an inscrutable series of hexadecimals. In the darkness they seemed to float.

“By the Allspark. They’re the ones—”

“What kind of reckless street-mechanic?” echoed Soundwave tinnily. He pulled his arm from Ratchet’s shaking hands. Red pinprick lights flickered through his mask, their glow diffusing in the dark.

“Have you been a step ahead of me this entire time?” snapped Ratchet. Every circuit in his processor seemed to blaze; he felt signal wash, crackling, through his fiber optics. “You manipulated me—”

Soundwave’s vocoder hissed like a bellows. “Trust.” It sounded glib.

“I’ll bet you do.” Ratchet’s fans clattered. He grimaced. Forced a smile. “Well, then. I have another house call to make.”


End file.
